Teatro Romano di Cassino

A semicircle of Augustan masonry in the middle of Cassino, the Roman Theatre was unearthed in 1936 and restored twice. It is a surviving monument of the ancient city of Casinum.

Why it matters

The theatre is a rare survivor: an ancient performance building still in cultural use, embedded in the modern town rather than isolated in a park. The Comune di Cassino describes it as a typical example of a Hellenistic-type theatre, raised in the Augustan age against the natural slope of the hill at the heart of the Roman city of Casinum. Its cavea is semicircular, about 53.5 metres across, and could hold some 2,500 spectators, a scale that tells you how substantial Casinum was before the Middle Ages renamed it San Germano. Unlike the nearby state-run monuments, the theatre belongs to the municipality, and after excavation and two rounds of restoration it again serves as a municipal cultural venue.

What to notice

The structure is legible from the orchestra: the retaining substructure against the hillside, the curve of the seating, and the two-colour reticulate masonry that the destination portal notes as characteristic of the build. The municipality records fragments of a statue of Octavian Augustus — a head, an arm and a draped shoulder — recovered in the excavation and now kept in the city's National Archaeological Museum. The modern town rises behind the stage; the medieval city grew around and over the theatre, concealing it until the twentieth century.

Context and history

Casinum's theatre took shape when the Roman city was prosperous, in the reign of Augustus, using the terrain so skillfully that little external superstructure was needed. The site lay in the heart of the ancient town, near the forum quarter, along the route of the Via Latina that linked Rome to Campania. Buried by the medieval town of San Germano, the building came back to light in 1936 through the excavations directed by the archaeologist Gianfilippo Carettoni, the scholar after whom the city's archaeological museum is now named. The municipality records restoration campaigns in 1959 and again in 2001, the first consolidating the structure after wartime damage in the devastated city, the second preparing it for continued use as a venue. The theatre's rebirth parallels the town's own reconstruction after the near-total destruction of 1944, which the destination portal documents in its account of the battle and the city's memory sites.